The Nix

The narrative returns to 2011 with Samuel meeting his mother. The meeting is awkward, although Faye’s lawyer tries to keep the focus on Faye’s legal dilemma. Faye defends throwing rocks at the governor as a “necessary and essential and knee-jerk response to the governor’s fascistic politics” (199). She faces numerous charges, and the lawyer asks Samuel about writing a letter in her support. Samuel, however, demurs. He asks his mother, “Why did you leave me?” (206). Faye cannot tell him: “It’s private” (207). Samuel storms out of the meeting: “You are a virtuoso,” he yells at her, “A maestro at being awful” (208).

Meanwhile Laura Pottsdam dreads her approaching meeting with the Dean over her trumped-up complaint about Samuel. She is struggling in all her classes; they seem silly and pointless. She much prefers spending hours wandering the mall with her friends who are equally shallow; texting risqué pictures to her boyfriend; or simply drifting off into uncomplicated daydreams.

Samuel agrees to have lunch with a video gamer, who goes by the name Pwnage, whose expertise in the game world of Elfscape impresses Samuel. Together in a diner booth the two commiserate over the importance of the virtual reality world and how by comparison the real world seemed dull and uninviting, how as game characters they touch genuine heroics because in the game world, unlike the real world, effort is rewarded: “In the face of something like that,” Pwnage says, “I’d say sinking into Elfscape is a pretty sane response” (227). Pwnage admits that he struggles with his weight and that his wife left him some time ago without warning: “That would never happen in a video game” (228). When Samuel confides in him about his mother, Pwnage expounds on what gaming teaches him: People are either “an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap” (231). The template intrigues Samuel, but which, he wonders, is his mother?

Samuel understands that as part of his research for the book on his mother he needs to go to Iowa, to his parents’ hometown, to talk with his grandfather, Frank, Faye’s father. Once there, he wanders about the small Iowa town, taking pictures of the high school where his mother went and the ChemStar factory where his grandfather worked. He finds Frank wasting away in Willow Glen Nursing Home. Samuel finds that although Frank’s memory is cloudy, he recalls with clarity growing up in Hammerfest, a Norwegian fishing village, and later his time as a chemical engineer at ChemStar. When Samuel presses him about the circumstances surrounding Faye’s brief time in college in 1968, Frank, dopey on medications, appears to slip back into time and reenacts his angry eviction of his daughter for being unmarried and pregnant. Frank tells Samuel that although he has had nothing to do with Faye, he stored boxes of her stuff—homework assignments, diaries, letters—on the grounds of the nursing home.

Samuel lugs all the boxes to his car. He calls his father, Henry, and demands he tell him the truth about Faye. Henry tells Samuel only that Frank is wrong, that Faye was not pregnant at all, and agrees to meet Samuel: “A new world,” Samuel feels, “is about to open” (253).